About me

I was born in the 90s. I live in south east Wales in the United Kingdom. I have a wide variety of interests, including in the areas of computing, electrical engineering, politics, amateur radio, aviation and sailing. I also enjoy:

• good food (whether it be French, Italian, Indian, Thai or just traditional British cooking done well);
• fine (red) wines;
• reading – mostly non-fiction, but I also enjoy the occasional whodunnit;
• art – various styles, but the Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque painters are probably my favourites;
• music – I have eclectic tastes, everything from pop and soft rock to classical music (particularly early music and the Baroque – I’m less keen on the Classical and Romantic periods), electronic music (particularly synthwave and vaporwave) and a little jazz;
• architecture, as long as it isn’t modern or post-modern (although I do like some early modern and Art Deco architecture); and
• travel.

My politics are conservative – broadly what may be considered late High Toryism, although like all things in life there are nuances. Despite this, I often find that after scratching the surface I am more laissez faire in attitude (if not in philosophy) than many self-professed “liberals”, especially outside whatever happens to be the progressive Zeitgeist.

Religiously, I am an agnostic, but recently I have been attending an Orthodox church.

Finally, my name is not really Valeoak, y’know? Yes, I know that my friends and even some good acquaintances would quickly recognise me in the description above, I am not afraid of being discovered by those who already know me well. But for various reasons, I prefer this pseudonymity.

My computing

I started using computers at the age of five or six: first a spare computer in my mother’s office on days in the school holidays when she would need to take me into the workplace, and then later a desktop computer she brought home from work nominally to be able to do work in the evenings and at weekends but was, in fact, really for my use. These machines ran Windows 95. In addition to drawing pictures in Microsoft Paint, I liked writing stories in Microsoft Word. I have a vague recollection of there later being another work desktop computer that ran Windows 98, but I am not certain of that.

My first self-owned personal computer was a Packard Bell bought for me by my father when I was perhaps eight years old. This ran Windows XP. I played The Sims on this machine and later Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, the latter sparking a lifelong and broader interest in aviation. This was the first computer on which I had internet access and browsed the web. I still have this machine in storage, although I have not tried powering it in about 15 years; interestingly, the last time was a brief attempt at running Linux for the first time.

The next computer, a Dell tower desktop, was bought for the household at my mother’s when I was around 11 years old, but this was located in my room and, for the most part, was really my computer. It was on this computer that I was introduced to the Valve Source-engine classics Half Life 2, Counter Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source and on which I first played games online. This was around the time I first built websites using Freewebs and learnt HTML, although the latter was mostly done during my daily tutorial time in my second year of secondary school, where we had access to PCs in my tutorial classroom.

Then after a few years I received – as multi-year Christmas and birthday presents – an Alienware gaming computer. This was after Windows Vista had been released, but it can’t have been that long after as I opted to purchase the computer with Windows XP SP3 instead, such was my disdain for Vista. The computer was seemingly impressive when I bought it, although now the 2 GiB or 4 GiB of memory (I forget which) seems paltry and would be unacceptable for any gaming machine. Although I forget how much it cost at the time, it would have been expensive and come with a significant Alienware markup; it would have undoubtedly been cheaper to build the thing myself. That said, if I had built a computer to the same specification, it would not have had the beautiful Alienware case: a glossy black with silver trim and an appealing but (appropriately) alien shape. The Alienware head logo on the front also functioned as the power button; this was mounted on a swing door that revealed the front panel with USB ports and the 3.5 mm audio ports, etc. aswell as the DVD drive and 3.5-inch floppy disk drive (yes, in an early sign of my retro tech attitudes, I ordered the floppy drive “just in case”).

The Alienware machine was the last Windows computer I owned. In 2009, not long before Windows 7 was released to the world, I had decided that I would not use Vista and, thus, would abandon Windows PCs. I decided to buy a new unibody MacBook Pro 17″.

To be continued…